Slamming Its Doors on the World

By Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran

As the editor of the Iranian Feminist Tribune, a website devoted to women's issues, Parvin Ardalan used to sit at her home computer each night, posting news articles on the site that the country's print press would never carry. She spread the word about sit-ins and seminars. At its busiest, the site attracted 70,000 visitors a day. But late last year, Ardalan received a text message from a friend informing her that the site had disappeared. Along with thousands of other websites--including opposition blogs like regimechange.blogspot.com and online retailers like Bloomingdales.com--the Feminist Tribune was blocked as part of a censorship campaign by Iran's new hard-line government but is still accessible outside Iran. "We lost one of our greatest tools," Ardalan says. "It's hindered our work, which I suppose was the goal."

For Western governments as much as for activists like Ardalan, the aims of the Iranian regime grow more alarming every day. Led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's elected government--whose powers are circumscribed by the country's ruling ayatullahs--has made confrontation the guiding tenet of its policies at home and in the world. The regime made its most provocative move yet last week, resuming work on its uranium-enrichment program, which the U.S. and some of its allies believe is a critical step toward the eventual production of nuclear weapons. The resumption touched off a flurry of international condemnation and raised the likelihood that Iran will be referred to the U.N. Security Council. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that by resuming enrichment activities, Iran has "shattered the basis for negotiation."

What happens next is still up in the air. The Bush Administration is pushing what one official calls a "very carefully calibrated, incremental approach." The first step would be a Security Council statement urging Iran to comply fully with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. If the Iranians refuse, the U.S. would urge the Security Council to issue a legal demand to Iran to suspend enrichment work. If all else fails, the U.S. and its allies are likely to pursue "targeted sanctions" against Tehran, such as restricting the regime's access to international financial channels and squeezing its ability to trade and travel. But getting agreement on the nature of sanctions--and avoiding a veto by Russia or China, which both have deep economic interests in Iran--could take months.

To many Iranians, Ahmadinejad's strategy of confrontation and refusal to compromise reflects the regime's unease as much as its pugnacity. At home, the new administration has sought to roll back the moves toward liberalization pursued by former President Mohammed Khatami and is imposing Islamic strictures and cracking down on even nonpolitical forms of expression, like women smoking in cafes and satellite TV. Some Iranians believe that the country's rulers fear further engagement with the West will embolden young people to demand greater freedoms, which may fatally undermine the regime's authority. "They feel danger, and their strategy of dealing with it is by attacking rather than cooperating," says a former senior reformist official.

The government's aggressive policing of the Internet reflects how decisively Ahmadinejad has stemmed momentum toward democratic reform. Hard-liners in Iran's judiciary first sought to seal off the Internet in 2004 by arresting Web technicians and bloggers. Since 2004, authorities have rounded up at least 20 writers for posting subversive material online, handing them jail terms ranging from a few days to 14 years. Last June, following Ahmadinejad's surprise election, the government launched a fresh onslaught, this time against the websites and blogs themselves. Using keyword filters and censorship software pirated from U.S. firms, the government blocked thousands of websites containing news, political content and satire. It even blocked the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The crude filters make it impossible to look up suggestive words such as women, so a Google search on women's pregnancy produces an ACCESS DENIED screen. "The end result is a marginalization of women and women's issues," says activist Sussan Tahmasebi.

Activist webmasters and bloggers are trying to navigate around the filters. Many have changed their domain names to get themselves back online for a few days until the censors catch up. Women in Iran, an assertive website carrying news and reports about women's issues, switched from com to a org address after being blocked, was filtered again and is now accessible as net. Activists in Iran now hoard backup domain names, although they have recently hit an unexpected wall: Iranian Web developers say that U.S. domain providers have stopped selling addresses to Iranian Web clients, claiming the sales contravene U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. As a result, some activists are investigating the possibility of running their sites through satellite services, which may allow them to evade the government's reach. Hossein Derakhshan, a prominent Iranian exile blogger who offers a quirky, Jon Stewart--like brew of political commentary, has watched Iranian visitors to his blog plummet from a high of about 8,000 hits a day to a low of about 1,500 a day. He sends out his daily content by e-mail, which for now remains free and, he hopes, secure.

Ahmadinejad's policies have started to cause splits within the country's ruling elite. He faces pressure to moderate his policies from some conservative rivals who are uncomfortable with his more incendiary statements, such as calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and openly rooting for the death of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But so far, even those critics are having difficulty being heard. Last October some prominent conservatives openly bared their criticism of Ahmadinejad on the news website Baztab, which belongs to Mohsen Rezai, the former commander of the Revolutionary Guards. The government promptly took the site down.

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington